SINGAPORE (Reuters) - EU's telecoms chief Viviane Reding said on Friday that China's censorship of the Internet was "unacceptable" and that the Beijing Olympics were a chance for the country to show its commitment to free flow of information.

Reding, who is the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media said she regards the Internet as a free medium for expression and any curtailment of that is limiting the citizen's right to information. "People should be free to receive information, we do not think blocking of sites for political reasons is the right way to proceed," Reding told Reuters.

"We say, for instance, to the Chinese very clearly that their blocking of certain Internet content is absolutely unacceptable to us," she said.

Reding was in Singapore to launch the European Union Centre to create greater awareness of EU affairs.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, China remains the world's leading jailer of journalists and writers. Beijing also exerts control over its fast-growing Internet sector, seeking to weed out porn and subversive websites.

However, the International Olympic Committee has said it is confident that China will deliver on its commitment to allow freedom to report in line with that enjoyed at previous Games.

"We will see during the Olympic games, when the world is going to look at Beijing (whether) Beijing is going to utilize this opportunity to have a free information flow," Reding said.

With 21,600 journalists accredited for the 2008 Olympics and up to half that number expected to descend on and report from the city without International Olympic Committee credentials, the Beijing Games promise to be the most intensely scrutinized Olympics in history.

The problem with Internet 2, however, is that the entire infrastructure will be controlled. There will be little, if any, freedom, and you will be tracked by your ip address through a biometric ID, censored and taxed according to the proportion of free speech that you desire.

Software designed to give the Internet a new lease on life and guarantee its continued growth is now running on Abilene, the Internet2 backbone network, officials of the Internet2 consortium announced last week. Universities and corporations use Abilene for testing next-generation Internet technologies.

The new software is known as Internet Protocol version 6 -- IPv6 for short. IPv6 is an improved version of the software used for packaging and routing data throughout the Internet. The software in use on the commercial Internet today, called IPv4, dates back to the early 1970s, well before anyone could foresee the Internet's tremendous growth. (A subsequent version, IPv5, was never widely promoted.)

For the time being, Abilene is running the old and new protocols side by side. Networking experts expect the old and new IP protocols will coexist for some time until people stop using IPv4.

The new protocol will fix problems that are invisible to most users, says Jim Bound, network technical director of the Unix systems business unit at Compaq Computer Corporation, who has been a key contributor of specifications for the new protocol. IPv6 is already in use on specialized networks in other parts of the world.

One of the first things IPv6 users will notice about the new protocol is its unfamiliar format for network addresses. Instead of four sets of numbers separated by dots, the new address format -- 205b:008b:cc16:006e:0210:a4ff:fe12:fec4, for instance -- looks quite different.

While Abilene is now one of the largest networks running the new IPv6 protocol, it is not the first. The Department of Energy's ESnet, France's Renater network, and the Netherlands' SURFnet, for example, already run IPv6. Japan, South Korea, and other parts of Asia are also promoting the new protocol.

The most glaring problem IPv6 aims to solve is the threat of running out of public Internet addresses -- unique numbers that can be assigned to computers on the Internet.

About four billion addresses are available under the IPv4 standard. That number, networking officials say, is far less than the number needed for everyone on earth -- 6.1 billion people -- to have even one distinct network address. Most network experts foresee a future in which each person will use many different sensors and handheld computers, each attached to the Internet and each with its own network address.

Were mobile computing, for example, to become as popular as cell-phone use, Mr. Bound says, there would not be enough IPv4 addresses for users to roam from one city to the next.

Under the IPv6 standard, the number of available Internet addresses is a mind-boggling 340 trillion, trillion, trillion, or 3.4(1038). "IPv6 is a better protocol," says Mr. Bound. "It will run better. It will do more things. It's the future."

Besides having a nearly unlimited number of possible addresses, IPv6 does a more efficient job of routing packages of data throughout the Internet, network officials say. And the new protocol promises other technical benefits, such as improved end-to-end network security and easier multicasting. The latter is a technique for broadcasting a video stream simultaneously, for example, to 100 or more different laboratories, conference rooms, or desktop computers.

IPv4's development was largely the work of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and American universities. The new protocol, however, was developed by an international community of network engineers and software designers known as the Internet Engineering Task Force. One consequence is that the IPv6 protocol is more widely used today in Europe and Asia than in the United States, says Dale Finkelson, a network engineer at the University of Nebraska who is co-chairman of the Internet2 IPv6 Working Group.

The new protocol is running on all of the Cisco Systems 1200 series routers on the existing Abilene backbone, Internet2 officials say, and it will be on all of the new Juniper Networks routers to be installed when Internet2 upgrades the Abilene network during the next year.

IPv6 will not increase the price of routers or other network equipment, says Mr. Bound, although he adds that some institutions may need to upgrade older hardware or operating systems to take advantage of the new protocol.

Officials of Internet2 and the IPv6 Forum, a consortium formed to promote the new protocol, say they have begun conducting training workshops for campus-network engineers. But it could be three to five years before many research universities switch to IPv6 for much of their work, says Michael H. Lambert, who is a network engineer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and co-chairman of the Internet2 IPv6 Working Group. "I imagine it's one of these things that will be played with first in the dorms," he says, "and finally makes it to the faculty desks."

If the tunnel is Internet2, then the light at the end of the tunnel is IPv6. New land speed record proves that native IPv6 service stands ready to meet current and emerging needs of high performance networking.

by Jim Thompson[October 4, 2002]

When the brain trust behind the Internet2 program speaks, anybody who sees the Internet as part of their future, better listen. These are the people who are laying the groundwork for tomorrow's Internet today—right now, they're talking about Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The group's latest innovations include deploying IPv6 across the Abilene backbone network and developing what may become the killer app for the next generation protocol—Voice over IPv6 (VoIPv6).

Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government, Internet2 engineers are developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies that will be the foundation of the public data highway of tomorrow. It was many of these same people who fostered the Internet as we know it today from its infancy. If anyone knows what's hot for the future, it's these people. According to members of the Internet2 group, IPv6 is not only the wave of the future—it's the only way for new networks to fly.

Abilene deploymentThe deployment of IPv6 over the nationwide Abilene backbone networks makes high-performance IPv6 service available to Internet2 member institutions and thousands of other research and education institutions across the country that have access to Abilene. Abilene's native IPv6 service also complements existing IPv6 deployment over other research and education networks around the world, such as the Energy Sciences Network in the U.S., knows as Esnet, Renater in France, and SURFnet in the Netherlands.

"We believe the deployment of IPv6 could be critical to sustaining the scalable growth and innovation that has distinguished the Internet's development over the past 30 years," said Steve Corbató, director of backbone network initiatives for Internet2.

Running on Cisco System's premier Internet router, the 12000 series, the Abilene experiment marks the first large scale deployment of native IPv6 in the U.S.

IPv6 provides a number of significant improvements over IPv4, including 128-bit long Internet addresses instead of the 32-bit addresses of IPv4 which vastly increases the number of available addresses and paves the way for a large range of new applications.

It also opens the door to higher speeds, as evidenced by a new Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) set this month using IPv6 by the University of Oregon, the Oregon Gigapop and NYSERNet working with the staff of Abilene.

Land speed recordIn the open competition, 3.47 gigabytes of information was transferred over 3,000 miles (4,810 km) of network from Eugene, Oregon to Syracuse, New York in one hour. This established a new I2-LSR IPv6 category record of 39.81 terabit meters per second.

"There's no question that routine delivery of real-world production information services of this sort is the best tangible proof that native IPv6 service stands ready to meet the current and emerging needs of the higher education high performance networking community," noted Joanne Hugi, associate vice president, Information Services at the University of Oregon.

Tim Lance, president of NYSERNet added that the IPv6 deployment across the Abilene backbone network is "approaching the same performance as the IPv4 network" and establishes a transcontinental network supporting IPv4 and IPv6 over the same infrastructure.

"[The Internet2 Land Speed Record] provides an important demonstration of IPv6's readiness to support day-to-day network applications," said Rich Carlson, network research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and chair of the I2-LSR judging panel.

IPv6 speaks upThe ultimate development and widespread deployment of IPv6 was given a further push with the announcement of support for the next generation protocol in Java2, standard edition 1.4.1 from Sun Microsystems, Inc. This addition paved the way for the development of a VoIPv6 application by the Swiss company, Telscom.

Based on Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) and called 6VOICE, the application uses IPv6 in a native mode which means it's the only transmission protocol and not embedded or tunneled through the present Internet. "With the successful deployment of VoIPv6 application, we are seeing the end of the dark tunnel and finding the bright light and business models of next generation networks based on IPv6 protocol," said Telscom managing director, Dr. Sathya Rao.

A successful test of the voice application was conducted using Linux systems for both fixed and Mobile IPv6 networks. Documentation and the application software is available to research groups from Telscom free of charge. If you are interested in the 6VOICE project, you should contact Dr. Rao directly.

For the time being, the Abilene network is running the old and new protocols side by side. Networking experts expect the old and new IP protocols will coexist for some time until people stop using IPv4 and migrate entirely to IPv6. Nobody knows for certain when this day will come—but Internet2 will be ready for it.

Logged

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.~Aldous Huxley

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. - ~Friedrich Nietzsche

SAN FRANCISCO: Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?

In March, Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, "Down for everyone, or just me?" It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

"I had seen that question posed so often," said Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. "Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true."

There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical problems in the last few months.

About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Payne's site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than a million dollars an hour in sales.

The Web, like any technology or medium, has always been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark.

But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were much lower. Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it.

Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That data are supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the office computer or filing cabinet.

The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock  and even the Internet's biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen.

Last holiday season, Yahoo's system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline.

The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.

"It was prolonged torture," said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business.

Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.

The volatile emotions around Web downtime are perhaps most prevalent in the discussion around Twitter, on which users post updates on who they are with, where they are, and what they are doing.

According to Pingdom, a Web monitoring firm, Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April  by far more than any other major social networking Web site.

Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of rancor, creating "Is Twitter Down?" T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube parodies, and posting copies of Twitter's various artfully designed error messages.

"This is a free service. It's not like anyone's life is depending on Twitter," said Laura Fitton, a consultant and self-described passionate Twitter user.

"Twitter is all about the things we discover we have in common, so right there, Twitter failing is a huge thing we have in common," she said. "It's fun to complain to each other and commiserate."

Twitter has said its downtime is the result of rapidly growing demand and fundamental mistakes in its original architecture.

Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, says the outcries over failures are understandable.

"When these sites go away, it's a sudden loss. It's like you are standing in the middle of Macy's and the power goes out," he said. "When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it's trauma."

He says Web services should be held to the same standard of reliability as the older services they aim to replace. "These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won't suddenly collapse."

By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is performing better than ever.

"There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world," said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors companies' Web performance. "These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare."

But perhaps they are not rare enough. One morning last month, Google App Engine, a service that lets people run interactive Web applications, was unavailable for several hours.

Among those affected was Payne, who had just shifted downforeveryoneorjustme.com over to Google's servers. It was inaccessible as well.

The internet will change beyond recognition by as early as next year in what is being billed as one of the most radical shake-ups over how net addresses work, if a vote to relax domain name rules is approved today.

After three years of negotiations, the organisation that regulates the World Wide Web will decide at a meeting in Paris this afternoon whether it should open up the strict rules governing top-level domains, the technical term for the suffixes that appear at the end of internet addresses such as ".org" and ".com".

In a separate but equally significant move for the developing world, the regulators will also begin allowing new scripts into cyberspace, which, until now, has been dominated by the Roman alphabet.

Although web pages support non-Roman scripts, there are currently no provisions to incorporate them into the address system that navigates users to specific web pages. Critics say that this stops billions of people in the developing world from accessing the internet, because they can only read their own script.

If the plans are approved they could also pave the way for companies to use their own names as suffixes by the middle of 2009, meaning that Microsoft.com, for instance, could become Microsoft.microsoft. Individuals would also be able to subscribe to any number of terms to use in their own internet addresses. The pornography industry, which accounts for around 12 per cent of all internet content, is also hoping to be allowed to use the .xxx domain name. Its representatives argue that the suffix would make it easier for customers to find sites, while giving those who do not wish to view porn a greater capacity to block it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the not-for-profit organisation that has regulated domain names since 1998, has spent over £10m trying to find a way to expand the accessibility of the Net after countries in the developing world complained it was overly dominated by developed nations.

In order to recoup the cost of the negotiations, sources say that companies will be expected to pay out a "six-figure sum" to register their own name.

There will also be discussions to include a fast-track system for some of the most commonly used scripts such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cyrillic.

Emily Taylor, a delegate attending the conference in Paris on behalf of Nominet, one of the world's largest internet registries, said including non-Roman scripts could be a major turning point in the history of the internet. "There are currently 1.5 billion people using the internet, which means that there are a good 4.5 billion people who are not doing so," she said. "These people are not from Europe or America – most of them will be from developing world nations where the Roman script is meaningless."

Some have expressed fears that the creation of new suffixes could confuse internet users, but others believe that the industry will regulate itself.

"The .com suffix is so well established that I don't think many companies will want to replace it," said Duncan Bell, managing editor of T3 technology magazine. "Microsoft.microsoft is not only harder to remember, it takes longer to type."

A COMBINATION of alcohol abuse and the impact of websites such as Facebook and YouTube has generated behavioural changes that are at the heart of spiralling rates of youth crime.

Analyses of police crime statistics from four states, to be presented at a conference in Brisbane tomorrow, show violent crime by young people is on the rise, with marked increases in offences committed by girls and by children of both sexes under 14, The Australian reports.

The proportion of violent crime committed by youth is also on the rise.

"We are seeing consistent trends indicating young people are becoming more violent," said Paul Mazerolle, director of Griffith University's Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, who compiled the figures.

"There are clearly changes in the behaviour of young people responsible for this crime."

The number of violent crimes committed by offenders aged between 10 and 19 in the four states - NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia - rose from 17,944 in 1996-97 to 23,382 in 2005-06. Violent crimes were listed as homicide, assault, sexual offences, robbery and extortion.

The proportion of violent young offenders who were female rose from 23 per cent to 26 per cent in the same period, and from 30 per cent to 37 per cent for those aged between 10 and 14.

The younger age group is increasingly crime-prone. Boys between 10 and 14 were responsible for 519 in 100,000 violent crimes in 1996-97, rising to 547 per 100,000 in 2005-06.

The number of violent crimes committed by girls between 10 and 14 rose from 166 in 100,000 to 229 over that time. The rate of assaults by girls in the younger age bracket went up by 60 per cent in Queensland, 45 per cent in NSW and 36 per cent in Victoria.

"Youth violence is still largely driven by young males, but young females are trending upwards," Professor Mazerolle said.

"The long-term increases show sharp percentage increases for the younger age group - those between 10 and 14."

Websites had fundamentally changed the way young people related to each other, he said, and this could be linked to the increase in youth crime.

"It's generated competition and encouraged them to look at ways of gaining status," Professor Mazerolle said.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico City police are investigating classified advertisements posted on the Internet by people offering their services as hired killers for as little as $6,000, police said on Friday.

One post on the Web site, which hosts free ads for people selling old home appliances or renting apartments, advertises the services of an "ex-military hitman, professional and discrete."

The man promises a "job guaranteed in 10 days or less" and adds "I have worked in Spain, only serious offers, $6,000."

A police spokeswoman said authorities were taking the ads seriously, at a time when Mexican drug cartels and organized crime gangs are going ever more public with their tit-for-tat murders and leaving bodies and severed heads in streets.

Some 1,700 people have been killed so far this year in attacks between rival cartels and the thousands of soldiers and federal police sent out to crack down on them. Gangs often use paid assassins using high-caliber weapons for their hits.

"The problem of hitmen is real and we are facing it all over the country -- people offer their services to kill someone for a price," city police official Miguel Amelio Gomez was quoted as saying in the daily Reforma newspaper.

Mexican drug gangs aired radio spots in Guatemala earlier this year seeking elite ex-soldiers to work as smugglers, and an armed wing of the Gulf cartel hung banners in towns near the U.S. border also advertising for new recruits.

One of the Internet ads, titled "Hitman -- Killer for Hire," reads: "Problems with a certain person? Want it taken care of? Write me. I am 100 percent professional and don't charge in advance."

One advertiser, contacted by Reuters, boasted that he had "international experience" and enough tales to write a book.

A slow and ineffective justice system means homicides in Mexico are often left uninvestigated and killers elude jail.

The website also has an ad from somebody seeking to hire a "reliable" hitman for "an easy job" in Mexico City.

Anonymity of bloggers is clashing with the lawBy Jonathan D. GlaterTuesday, July 15, 2008

There is no better way to get a blogger talking than by telling him what he cannot publish, although you might forgive a government prosecutor for thinking otherwise.

A grand jury subpoena sent by prosecutors in New York this year sought information to help identify people blogging anonymously on a Web site about New York politics called Room 8.

The subpoena carried a warning in capital letters that disclosing its very existence "could impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with law enforcement" - implying that if the bloggers blabbed, they could be prosecuted.

"We were totally perplexed," said Ben Smith, who founded Room 8 with Gur Tsabar. (The site calls itself an "imaginary neighbor" to the press room - Room 9 - in the New York City Hall.) The two promptly began looking for a lawyer. "We knew enough to be scared."

This, of course, is a blogger's nightmare: enforced silence and the prospect of jail time.

The district attorney eventually withdrew the subpoena and lifted the warning after the bloggers threatened to sue. But the fact that the tactic was used at all raised alarm bells for some free speech advocates.

The demand for secrecy raised the unnerving prospect that prosecutors could quietly investigate anyone who posts comments online, while the person making those comments is unaware of and unable to respond to the risk. The tactic also robs bloggers of one of their most powerful weapons: the chance to spread the word and turn the legal attack into an online cause célèbre.

Lawsuits over information posted online are usually civil, not criminal - that is, they are filed by private citizens or companies trying to keep something off the Web. Courts have developed ways to evaluate the claims, often using tests to balance the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections of speech against the harm caused by whatever someone wrote or said.

Using such an analysis this year, a judge in San Francisco reversed an order disabling a Web site that allowed the anonymous posting of documents after he weighed concerns about the order's effect on free speech.

In that case, efforts to block access to the Web site, called Wikileaks, ended up attracting far more attention to the documents posted there.

But there are fewer precedents explaining how courts should evaluate criminal subpoenas, according to legal experts. Perhaps that is because prosecutors are more cautious about the risk of violating the First Amendment and so issue fewer criminal subpoenas, or because the subpoenas themselves carry language prohibiting disclosure of their terms.

"In the criminal context it's trickier because it's the government asking for stuff, and I think it's going to be harder to fashion a rule, especially when the government is not exactly willing to part with the reasons" for requesting the information in the first place, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

Without knowing the motives of prosecutors, he continued, judges may be hard-pressed to balance their needs against the importance of free speech.

Bloggers concerned about possible litigation may want to check the privacy policies of their Internet service providers, to see whether they include a pledge to notify any customer whose site is the subject of a subpoena, Zittrain said.

Armed with that knowledge, a blogger could fight the subpoena in court. Software also exists that is intended to make it difficult to identify those who want to be anonymous online.

Some of the people blogging on the Room 8 site are named, but many choose to be anonymous. Smith said he called the assistant district attorney in Bronx County, New York, who had issued the subpoena to try to find out more about why prosecutors wanted the Internet Protocol, or IP address, of the person who blogged under the name Republican Dissident. But the prosecutors would not share any information, he said.

An IP address, together with the date and time of an online comment, can help identify the computer used to make that comment.

Smith said he was not opposed to helping prosecutors in all cases.

"Was somebody found face-down on their keyboard and the IP address was going to help identify the killer?" he said. "We're not free speech absolutists here."

Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, said Monday that the office had no comment on any investigation related to the subpoenas sent to Room 8. Reed, however, said it was not uncommon for subpoenas to have nondisclosure language in order to protect an inquiry.

Because of that withdrawal, Smith and his lawyers could share court filings in the case and talk about it openly.

In addition to Republican Dissident, prosecutors wanted to identify several other people who chose to post comments anonymously.

The prospect of helping to unmask some of the commentators on the site made Smith and Tsabar nervous.

"If our anonymous bloggers were to learn that we'd been handing out their identities to politicians whom they've been criticizing, I think they'd be much less likely to write on the site," Smith said.

Google search data to be used in obscenity trial in FloridaBy Matt RichtelTuesday, June 24, 2008

Judges and jurors in the United States who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: Does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community's tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like "orgy" than for "apple pie" or "watermelon."

The publicly accessible data are vague in that they do not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics - and that, by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data might not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community's values.

But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts, interests and desires of their users.

"Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," said Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed," he added.

Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more specific search data, including the number of searches for certain sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the company was reviewing the subpoena.

Walters is defending Clinton Raymond McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene material through a Web site based in Florida. The charges include racketeering and prostitution, but Walters said the prosecution's case fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is obscene.

Such cases are a relative rarity this decade. In the last eight years, the U.S. Justice Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, according to Jeffrey Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been hundreds involving child pornography.) Prosecutions at the state level have followed a similar arc.

The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex - definitions that are based on "contemporary community standards."

Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally.

A better barometer, Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain.

"All you had to go on is what was available for public consumption, and that was a very crude tool," Douglas said. "The prospect of having measurement of Internet traffic brings a more objective component than we've ever seen before."

In a federal obscenity case heard this month, Douglas defended another Florida pornographer. In the trial, Douglas set up a computer in the courtroom and did Internet searches for sexually explicit terms to show the jury that there were millions of Web pages discussing such material. He then searched for other topics, like the University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, to demonstrate that there were not nearly as many related Web sites.

The jury was evidently not swayed, as his client was convicted on all counts.

The case that Walters is defending takes the tactic to another level. Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

COMPUTER industry heavyweights are rushing to fix a flaw in the foundation of the internet that could allow hackers to control traffic on the worldwide web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software "patch" released overnight to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

"It's a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the internet works," Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said.

"You'd have the internet, but it wouldn't be the internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything."

The flaw would be a boon for "phishing" cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address was typed into a web browser.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and warned industry giants including Microsoft, Sun and Cisco to collaborate on a solution.

DNS is used by every computer that links to the internet and works similar to a telephone system routing calls to proper numbers, in this case the online numerical addresses of websites.

"People should be concerned but they should not be panicking," Mr Kaminsky said.

"We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch. Something of this scale has not happened before."

Mr Kaminsky has built a web page where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability.

Mr Kaminsky was among about 16 researchers from around the world who met in March at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, to figure out what to do about the flaw.

"I found it completely by accident," he said.

"I was looking at something that had nothing to do with security. This one issue affected not just Microsoft and Cisco, but everybody."

The cadre of software wizards charted an unprecedented course, creating a patch to release simultaneously across all computer software platforms.

"This hasn't been done before and it is a massive undertaking," Mr Kaminsky said.

"A lot of people really stepped up and showed how collaboration can protect customers."

Automated updating should protect most personal computers. Microsoft released the fix in a software update package overnight.

A push is on to ensure company networks and internet service providers make certain their computer servers are impervious to web traffic hijackings using the DNS attack.

The patch can't be "reverse engineered" by hackers interested in figuring out how to take advantage of the flaw, technical details of which are being kept secret for a month to give companies time to update computers.

"This is a pretty important day," said Jeff Moss, founder of a premier Black Hat computer security conference held annually in Las Vegas.

"We are seeing a massive multi-vendor patch for the entire addressing scheme for the internet – the kind of a flaw that would let someone trying to go to Google.com be directed to wherever an attacker wanted."

Have your say! Comments are open on this article - add yoursONE third of Australian households say they do not supervise their children's internet use and less than half have an internet content filter installed, according to a report.

Most children are being introduced to the internet between the age of six and ten and parents are opting for in-home measures over content filters to protect them online, the latest Sensis e-Business Report shows.

More than half of the 1500 households surveyed said they were aware of the Federal Government's free Net Alert internet content filter program, but only 11 per cent had actually visited the website.

Instead, most families supervised their children's internet use and chose to place the computer in an open area of the home.

However about one third said they had never supervised their children online or had stopped when their children became young teenagers. Of these households, 46 per cent had a content filter installed – more than the overall figure of 36 per cent.Related Coverage

Almost one in five children began using the internet even earlier, at the age of five or younger, and more children used social networking websites than online chat rooms, the report said.

The Sensis e-Business Report gathered data on the computer use of consumers and small to medium-sized businesses and reported similar findings to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' latest social trends snapshot released earlier this week.

The Australian Social Trends 2008 report found almost two thirds of households had internet access and broadband connections outnumbered dial-up links by more than two to one.

Nuclear families were leading the rise in internet use, with two-parent families with dependent children more likely to have internet access than any other household type.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple's iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet. The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

This week, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) is trying to broker a last-minute deal between webcasters and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies. The negotiations could reduce the per-song rate set by the federal panel last year.

The two sides appear to be far apart, however, with Berman frustrated.

"Most of the rate issues have not been resolved," Berman said. "If it doesn't get much more dramatic quickly, I will extricate myself from the process."

"We're losing money as it is," said Westergren, a former acoustic rocker. "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money."

The digital reproduction of works in print, audio and video has provoked waves of lawsuits over who should benefit from copyrighted works distributed over the Internet.

The media company Viacom sued YouTube for running clips. Record companies have sought to punish file-sharers. And in radio, the digital transformation has recharged long-standing disputes over how much performers and their record companies ought to be paid when a song gets played.

By contrast to traditional radio, which broadcast only one song at any given time, Pandora's technology allows listeners to create their own stations, through which hundreds of thousands of song are played simultaneously.

For example, if a Pandora listener expresses a preference for "Debaser" by the Pixies, Pandora will search its catalog for songs that have similar musical qualities and create a station accordingly.

Soon after its launch, Pandora drew raves and listeners. Revenue at the growing company, which is supported by venture capital investors, was slated to rise above costs for the first time in 2009, Westergren said.

Then came the decision by the Copyright Royalty Board.

"I was on the bus when I get this message on my Treo," Westergren said. "I thought, 'We're dead.' "

SoundExchange, the organization that represents performers and record companies, said it supports the higher royalties for Internet radio because musicians deserve a bigger cut of Internet radio profits.

"Our artists and copyright owners deserve to be fairly compensated for the blood and sweat that forms the core product of these businesses," said Mike Huppe, general counsel for SoundExchange.

The Copyright Royalty Board last year decided that the fee to play a music recording on Web radio should step up from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2006 to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2010.

Multiplied by the millions of songs and thousands of listeners Pandora serves, that means the company will have to pay about $17 million this year, Westergren said.

The effect may be even worse for smaller outfits. Many small webcasters have said that the royalties as determined by the copyright board would be 100 percent to 300 percent of annual revenue, said David Oxenford, a lawyer who represents some of them.

"Obviously, that's not going to work," he said.

Even more galling to webcasters is the fact that they pay more for playing a song than traditional or satellite radio, a result of patchwork regulation created as each technology emerged.

Traditional radio pays nothing in performance royalties, though SoundExchange is pressing to change that. Satellite radio pays 6 or 7 percent of revenue. And then there are webcasters, which pay per song, per listener.

Using listener figures from Arbitron for XM Satellite Radio, it is possible to estimate that the company will pay about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener.

SoundExchange officials argue that because different media have different profit margins, it is appropriate to set different royalty rates.

Moreover, they complain, Internet radio stations have done too little to make money from playing their songs.

Pandora makes advertising money only from spots placed on its Web page, not on audio ads that run between songs. Other stations are similarly struggling to persuade companies to pay for advertising in the new medium.

"We're taking this challenge very seriously," Westergren said. "When we have our board meetings, the central topic is the revenue trajectory, not how happy our users are."

He said Pandora has a 30-person ad sales operation, or about 25 percent of its workforce. The company will soon start running subtler ads similar to those on National Public Radio, too, he said.

"Something like 'The next half hour is brought to you by . . .' " he said.

Westergren and other webcasters argue that Web radio, which generally plays a far wider range of music than is offered by traditional radio, provides invaluable promotion for many independent musicians.

Matt Nathanson, a singer-songwriter who has recorded for both major and independent record labels, said he is worried that the demands placed on Internet radio could "choke" the industry before it gets its footing.

"Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me," he said. "The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue."

Westergren, seemingly wearied by the constant haggling over the issue, signaled that Pandora's investors may also be impatient for an end.

"We're funded by venture capital," he said. "They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn't feel like its headed towards a solution, we're done."

EXCLUSIVE: Sunday Herald uncovers theft of data from every guest in 1300 Best Western Hotels in past 12 monthsBy Iain S Bruce

AN INTERNATIONAL criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007.advertisement

Amounting to a complete identity-theft kit, the stolen data includes a range of private information including home addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.

"They've pulled off a masterstroke here," said security expert Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx. "There are plenty of hacked company databases for sale online but the sheer volume and quality of the information that's been stolen in the Best Western raid makes this particularly rare. The Russian gangs who specialise in this kind of work will have been exploiting the information from the moment it became available late on Thursday night. In the wrong hands, there's enough data there to spark a major European crime wave."

Although the security breach was closed on Friday after Best Western was alerted by the Sunday Herald, experts fear that information seized in the raid is already being used to pursue a range of criminal strategies.

These include: l Armed with the numbers and expiry dates of customers' credit cards, fraudsters are equipped to make multiple high-value purchases in their victims' names before selling on the goods.

l Bundled together with home addresses and other personal details, the stolen data can be used by professional organised criminal gangs which specialise in identity theft to apply for loans, cards and credit agreements in the victims' names.

l Because the compromised information included future bookings, the gang now has the capacity to sift through the data and sell "burglary packs", giving the home addresses of local victims and the dates on which they are expected to be away from their home.

Although the nature of internet crime makes it extremely difficult to track the precise details of the raid, the Sunday Herald understands that a hacker from India - new to the world of cyber-crime - succeeded in bypassing the system's security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations. The next time a member of staff logged in, her username and password were collected and stored.

"Large corporate companies rely on anti-virus products to protect their infrastructure, but the problem with this approach is that these products only detect around 60% of threats out there. In the right hands, viruses can easily bypass these programs, as was the case here," explained Erasmus.

The stolen login details were then put up for sale and shared on an underground website operated by a notorious branch of the Russian mafia, which specialises in internet crime and offers heavily guarded and untraceable hosting services with no questions asked for criminal activity. Once the information was online, experts estimate that it would take less than an hour to write and run a software bot' - a simple computer programme - capable of harvesting every record on Best Western's European reservation system.

With eight million people staying in the hotel group's 86,375 continental rooms every year, gaining access to the system is a major coup for the cyber-criminals responsible. Given that criminals now have access to all bookings from 2007-2008, and based on the FBI-sponsored Internet Crime Complaint Center's reports that the average victim of internet crime loses £356, they are sitting on a potential haul of at least £2.84bn.

After thanking the Sunday Herald for exposing the raid on its systems, Best Western Hotels closed the breach at around 2pm on Friday afternoon. Stressing that staff are fully aware of the potential seriousness of the attack, the company reassured customers that it is now taking appropriate action.

"Best Western took immediate action to disable the compromised log-in account in question. We are currently in the process of working with our credit card partners to ensure that all relevant procedural standards are met, and that the interests of our guests are protected," said a spokesman.

"We continue to investigate the root cause of the issue, including, but not limited to, the third-party website that has allegedly facilitated this illegal exchange of information."

BRITISH police charged three men with terrorism offences on Thursday over threats to kill Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted on a militant Islamic website.Lancashire police said they had charged Ishaq Kanmi, 22, with soliciting murder and belonging to a banned group - al-Qaeda. Abbas Iqbal, 23, and 21-year-old Ilyas Iqbal were charged with disseminating banned publications.

Two others remained in custody, police said.

The three men who were charged, all from Blackburn in northern England, were arrested at Manchester airport earlier this month.

They were held after an investigation into threats posted on an Islamic militant website in January by a group calling itself al-Qaeda in Britain.

Mr Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair were suggested as targets of suicide attacks unless Britain withdrew its troops from Iraq and released Muslims imprisoned in Britain.

British police have been on high alert after co-ordinated suicide attacks on London's transport system in July 2005 killed 52 people.

Several other plots have been uncovered or have failed, including attempted car bombings in Glasgow and London last year.

A BRITISH data processing firm has launched an urgent review after a staff member sold a computer on eBay containing personal details of one million bank customers.

The computer was bought on the online auction site for £35 ($75) by Andrew Chapman, an IT manager from Oxford, in central England, who found the information on the computer's hard drive.

It included bank account numbers, phone numbers, mothers' maiden names and signatures of one million customers of American Express, NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), The Independent reported.

It had belonged to data processing company Mail Source which is part of Graphic Data, a company that holds financial information for banks and other organisations.

A spokeswoman for Mail Source said the employee who sold the computer had made an "honest mistake" but insisted it had been an "isolated incident".

She said: "The computer was removed from our secure storage facility in Essex and sold on eBay.

"We know which employee took the server and sold it, but we believe it was an honest mistake and it was not intentional to sell it without the server being cleared.

"This is a very unfortunate incident and we are taking measures to ensure it will never happen again."

An RBS spokeswoman said: "Graphic Data has confirmed to us that one of their machines appears to have been inappropriately sold on via a third party.

"As a result, historical data relating to credit card applications from some of our customers and data from other banks were not removed.

"We take this issue extremely seriously and are working to resolve this regrettable loss with Graphic Data as a matter of urgency."

EBay said such an item should never have been sold on its site.

There have been a series of data security blunders in Britain in the past year.

In two of the most serious cases, the Government admitted in November it had lost confidential records for 25 million Britons who receive child benefit payments, and in January, the Ministry of Defence revealed that a laptop with details of some 600,000 people interested in joining the armed forces had been stolen from a naval officer.

One reveller, Wana3q, wrote: "If the cops just let the party go on then they wouldn't have had to shut down Parramatta Rd or deal with a potentially volatile situation. I feel it was a massive overreaction."

Connecting regularly to the Internet to read the latest news or check emails, few people think how this all functions. And hardly could they imagine that in a couple of years they won’t be able to access their favourite web sites. The "father of the internet" Vint Cerf has warned that the web will run out of IP (internet protocol) addresses by 2010.

They stand for unique codes that allow computers to communicate with each other. Cerf explained the problem is similar to running out of telephone numbers. With no new numbers, you can't have more subscribers, with no IP addresses, some computers will not be able to go online.

He says the issue should be dealt with now to switch users to a new system.

The current internet protocol version four (IPv4) system had a total of 4.2 billion addresses when the internet was founded in 1977. Each of the IPv4 addresses has a series of 32 binary numbers.

A new system is called IPv6, with 128 bits-long addresses providing 3.4×10^38 address space. It is already used in Japan for seismic alerts through television programmes and turning traffic lights red.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, outlined plans yesterday for a huge expansion of the Government’s capability to access data held by internet services, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, and gaming networks.

The move follows growing concern among police and the security services that serious criminals and terrorists are using websites as a way of concealing their communications.

At present security and intelligence agencies can demand to see telephone and e-mail traffic from communication service providers, such as mobile telephone companies. But rapid expansion of new providers, such as gaming, social networking, auction and video sites, and technologies, such as wireless internet and broadband, present a serious problem for the police, MI5, Customs and other government agencies.

Communications data is now a key weapon in securing convictions of both terrorists and serious criminals. It also plays a central role in investigations into kidnappings and inquiries into missing and vulnerable people.

In the Metropolitan Police service alone last year, 54,000 applications were approved for officers to have access to communications data including to whom and when a phone call, text message or e-mail was sent – but not the content. A total of 650 applications concerned investigations into tracing missing or vulnerable people.

“Communications data forms an important element of prosecution evidence in 95 per cent of serious crime cases,” a security source said. “We could not begin to start to solve any kidnap in this country without access to the data.”

Overall there were 519,260 requests for communication data last year with the vast majority coming from the intelligence services, police and other law enforcement organisations, such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency and HM Revenue & Customs.

Under Ms Smith’s plans, police and the security services will not be able to access the content of the communications but will know each website visited, and to whom and when a phone call was made or a text message or e-mail was sent. If this raises suspicions, ministerial approval can be sought to intercept what is being sent and read the content.

The police and the security services say that it is becoming difficult to locate data because there are now so many communication service providers. The use of multiple user names is also thwarting efforts to identify individuals.

In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research yesterday, the Home Secretary said that changing technologies were presenting challenges to collecting data. A consultation paper next year would outline “some way or other to collect that data and store it”. Legislation could follow later in the year or in 2010.

Ms Smith said: “The communication revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data needs to change too. If it does not, we will lose this vital capability.”

She gave warning that the alternatives to more electronic data being stored would be expensive and invasive. “If you want to maintain your ability to identify where the user of a mobile phone is, let’s say . . . it may well be that the only other alternative to collecting that data would be a massive expansion of surveillance and other intrusive methods of tracking.”

The Times has learnt that police chiefs are to begin a discreet lobbying exercise in favour of the new powers. “This is a hugely important issue,” a senior source said. “To lose the capability to collect phone data would be disastrous.”

Opposition MPs and privacy groups attacked any further extension of state power as Orwellian. A leaked memo written by sources close to the so-called interception modernisation programme said that officials in the Home Office viewed a giant database as “impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful from a human rights perspective”.

Australians may not be able to opt out of the government's Internet filtering initiative like they were originally led to believe. Details have begun to come out about Australia's Cyber-Safety Plan, which aims to block "illegal" content from being accessed within the country, as well as pornographic material inappropriate for children. Right now, the system is in the testing stages, but network engineers are now saying that there's no way to opt out entirely from content filtering.

The Australian government first revealed its filtering initiative in 2007, which it expected to cost AUS$189 million to implement. That money would go toward imposing filtering requirements on ISPs, who would have to use the Australian Communications and Media Authority's official blacklist, which is in turn based on the country's National Classification Scheme.

Australia moved forward with its plans despite widespread public outcry and began testing the system in Tasmania in February of this year. At the time, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said that the filters would be enabled by default and that consumers would have to request unfiltered connectivity if they wished to opt-out of the program.

Well, it turns out now that those promises were only partially true. Internode network engineer Mark Newton told Computerworld that users are able to opt out of the "additional material" blacklist—which targets content inappropriate for children—but not the main blacklist that filters what the Australian government determines is illegal content.

"That is the way the testing was formulated, the way the upcoming live trials will run, and the way the policy is framed; to believe otherwise is to believe that a government department would go to the lengths of declaring that some kind of Internet content is illegal, then allow an opt-out," Newton said. "Illegal is illegal and if there is infrastructure in place to block it, then it will be required to be blocked—end of story."

A spokesperson for the Australian Communications Minister seemed to confirm this revelation by saying that the filters would be required for all Australian citizens.

Assuming this is in fact the way the scheme is implemented in practice, it raises plenty of troubling questions. "Illegal" is a broad definition, leaving users wondering exactly what kinds of content will end up falling prey to the government's apparently mandatory filtering restrictions. Will Big Content be ringing up the Aussie government soon to have tracker sites added to the blacklist? What about sites that discuss topics like at-home bomb making, or something a little less explosive, like DVD decryption tools? And how about those sites that advise users on how to get around the filters? Will various Wikipedia pages be blocked?

Australia continues to ignore its own government-funded studies from 2006 that show ISP-level filtering to be ineffective and costly. The Australian government's disregard for those prior studies suggests that the driving force behind the current plan is more political than technical.

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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.~Aldous Huxley

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. - ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Australia’s ongoing debate over internet censorship has taken an interesting turn, with the Minister in charge of implementing internet censorship attempting to censor a critic of the Government’s proposal.

The Labor Government elected in late 2007 promoted a policy that would make it mandatory for internet service providers to offer a “clean feed” to homes, that blocked content deemed illegal, pornographic and inappropriate. Until recently, Minister Conroy had publicly stated that internet users would be able opt-out of the filter, but in a backflip has since disclosed that the filter will be compulsory, with two levels: one for children, and one for adults. Australia’s strict and sometimes bizarre censorship regime would see online adult games blocked (such as Second Life) because Australia doesn’t offer an R (adult) classification for games, and would also see soft pornography banned online despite being freely available a petrol (gas) stations.

The latest drama was reported by the Fairfax newspapers, who obtained copies of an email, and details of a phone call from the Ministers office directed towards a critic of the Government’s plan.

Mark Newton, an engineer at Australia ISP Internode, has heavily criticized the Government and its filtering policy on popular Australian broadband forum Whirlpool, and went as far as saying that the censorship regime would enable child abuse by ignoring non-web applications which are will not be censored under the plan (the tech behind the censorship plan doesn’t block P2P and chat for example).

The Ministers office wrote to the Internet Industry Association (IIA) board member Carolyn Dalton based on Newton working for Internode, despite his criticism being offered in a personal capacity.

“In your capacity as a board member of the IIA I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message. I have also advised [IIA chief executive] Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour ,”

The email was accompanied by a phone call demanding that the message be passed on to senior Internode management.

As Asher Moses points out in The Age, the irony in the Ministers response is that the Minister himself has constantly branded critics of the censorship plan as being in favor in child pornography.

Although this shouldn’t come as a great surprise, it is none the less unacceptable in a democratic country that a Minister would seek to censor critics who are doing nothing more than exercising their rights to publicly disagree.

Enough is enough. I call on the Minister to resign, or should he not do so, I call on the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to sack the Minister at the first available opportunity. This abuse of power has no place in a modern, free and democratic society in the 21st century.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.

The Federal Government is accused of planning to implement controversial new internet restrictions more strict than those used in Iran, and of attempting to silence any critics of the plan.

Online users lobby groups say the two-tiered online filter system described by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy this week could slow down internet speeds by 86 per cent, and will still not cover the bulk of internet traffic.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world,” Colin Jacobs, from online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, told Fairfax.

Mr Conroy revealed details of the government’s $44.2 million policy, which is aimed at blocking access to illegal and pornographic material, at a Senate Estimates committee this week.

He said the first tier would block all “illegal material”, and that users would be forced to use it. The second tier would be optional, and would block out content deemed inappropriate for children.

Critics have pointed out that the filters will not block online content coming through peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which is believed to account for 60 per cent of online traffic.

Now Mr Conroy is accused of trying to silence his critics, after one of his advisors wrote an “intimidating” email to an engineer who slammed the plan on the Whirlpool broadband community forum.

Mark Newton, and engineer at broadband company Internode, was sent a disapproving email by Mr Conroy’s policy advisor after he said the new plan would not work and could even enable child abuse.

“In your capacity as a board member of the IIA (Internet Industry Association) I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message,” the email from Mr Conroy’s advisor Belinda Dennett read.

“I have also advised (IIA chief executive) Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour.”

Mr Newton told Fairfax the email showed Mr Conroy was “misusing his influence as a Commonwealth Minister to intimidate a private dissenting citizen into silencing his political views”.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.

Labor's high-speed National Broadband Network is a step in the right direction, but their plan to block inappropriate websites by forcing ISPs to install content filtering systems will slow down internet access and raise the cost of service.

Unlike website filters installed on your personal computer, filters installed at your ISP need to check hundreds of thousands of websites and then decide whether they're pornographic or inappropriate. As it stands, no technology capable of doing this accurately exists. Current filters are of varying accuracy and severely affect internet performance - and the Government knows it.

A recent ACMA report on ISP filtering products showed that all of the products tested degraded Internet performance, with two of them reducing speed by more than 75 per cent. One filter reduced network speed by only 2 per cent, but it was one of the least accurate at identifying inappropriate and illegal websites. It also mistakenly blocked many innocent sites. The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, seemed oblivious to this and hailed the trial a success.

Senator Conroy insists mandatory filtering will protect children from violent and pornographic content online, but that's simply untrue. It's rare that surfing the web will unwillingly land you head first in illicit pictures and movies. On most occasions you need to be searching for risqué material to find it and that won't change with a filter in place. Nor will access to it as circumvention can be easily achieved within minutes. For those occasions when you do accidently stumble across pornography, there's no guarantee a filter would block it anyway.

As for banning websites that are 'inappropriate', is the Government really in the best position to decide what that is? Does inappropriate include information on sexual health, breast-feeding, drugs and abortion? The one size fits all approach of filtering at ISP level causes problems because young children, teenagers and adults often use the same family computer. Material inappropriate in one household might be appropriate in another, but the Government's scheme doesn't allow for any fine-tuning. It's a poor substitute for the discretion and attention of parents.

A combination of supervision, education and empowerment is the only way we can be sure children are equipped to navigate the web responsibly. Arguments that filtering is worth trying, even if it doesn't work, show complete disregard for the well being of young Australians and their future standing as technology leaders.

Meanwhile, extra ISP infrastructure needed to meet the burden of filtering will drive up the cost of your internet service bill. Network engineer Mark Newton says ISPs will also require more call centre staff to deal with angry customers who can't access websites.

Large operators may be able to absorb these costs, but small ISPs risk going under and consumer choice becoming limited. As a matter of fact, all businesses risk losing out under the Government's plan. Given the rate the tested filters block innocent websites, a whopping 10,000 out of every one million at best, it won't take long for sites belonging to the local plumber or GP to be mistaken and banned. Any loss of income due to website downtime is inexcusable and it's still not clear if or how we'll be able to appeal a decision.

There's also the issue of filtering HTTPS web traffic - the protocol used for online banking transactions. Five of the filters tested for ACMA could intercept HTTPS traffic, a worrying prospect if the Government intends to use one for blocking secure websites that are inappropriate or illegal. A filter inspecting secure banking data and online purchases for unsavory content effectively opens the door to fraudsters and undermines the entire e-commerce process.

To provide a safer environment for children online we need to focus on areas posing a real threat to young Australians like cyber-bullying, identity theft and online predators. Filtering does nothing to reduce these risks. Just like we educate children about staying safe outside, we need to educate them about staying safe online. Walk them through it just like we'd walk them to the park. If that means educating parents unfamiliar with the Internet as well, then let's do it.

Despite all the shortcomings in the ACMA report, the Government is progressing to live ISPs trials using real customers. Senator Conroy and his department are unwilling to acknowledge that ISP filtering is unworkable and find themselves in a position where it seems hard to turn back, though not impossible. Instead his office prefers to brand those who object as presenting extreme views or equating freedom of speech with watching child pornography. I'm sure Labor's time would be better spent implementing their other cyber-safety promises aimed at actually benefiting children.

To make matters worse, Senator Conroy's office now says filters will be mandatory for all internet users.

Australians will pay for ISP filtering with decreased performance and higher charges, but to limit the free flow of information that makes the Internet the most valuable communication and education tool of our time, means we'll pay a much larger price in the long term.

Michael Meloni is a production manager at an online media company in Brisbane. He blogs about censorship issues at Somebody Think Of The Children.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.

MCDONALD'S plans to launch "family friendly" free WiFi services to its stores in a multimillion-dollar three-year deal with network security provider Earthwave. The restaurant chain will offer free internet access for its 1.45 million daily customers, at around 720 participating restaurants nationwide.

It will use Earthwave's Clean Pipes to block websites containing pornography or unwanted material such as information about hacking, bomb-making and terrorism, as a means of protecting its young customers as well as the company's family friendly brand.

Earthwave chief executive Carlo Minassian says Clean Pipes will enforce security policy rules that have been set down by McDonald's management.

"The policy includes more than 100 pre-defined categories, as well as black and white lists that McDonald's can control," he said. "Authorised managers will have access to a secure Earthport portal via an RSA SecurID token, where they can make changes to their policy."

Mr Minassian said the project involves the use of multiple tier-1 commercial web protection and filtering technologies, including URL and content filtering, intrusion prevention, firewall and distributed denial of service prevention.

Clean Pipes will also monitor and protect against threats arising from internet traffic generated by customers using the WiFi hotspots.

"In providing an internet service to customers, it's critical that McDonald's employs the best security available for its networks and any personal online information,'' he said.

"We've adopted an architectural, defence in-depth approach as the best way of securing data belonging to customers, staff and partners across a number of sites.''

McDonald's Australia chief executive Henry Shiner said Earthwave's local presence, certified operations and "proven ability against potential insider as well as external threats'' had proved to be the deal-clincher.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.

wvoutlaw2002

Well the cost of a Big Mac will increase anyway when Obama and his merry band of f*ckwits pass the "fat tax" and use the "fat tax" force people to thumbscan when they buy any food and to "take care of the 'useless eaters'". I've been saying for a long time that the elite have artificially inflated the prices of real food and made junk food and fast food cheap and affordable, only to eventually artifically inflate the prices of even junk food and fast food. After that the following will happen:

1. People will starve to death.

2. People will submit to the police state so they can eat.

3. Some people will deal in black market food, most of which will be government operations designed to get black market food buyers put in prison/camps.

4. Some people will riot over their fast food being taken away, and the militarized police will rush in with semi-automatic rifles, tasers, and whatever other torture devices they will happen to carry at that time, and the rioters who they do not kill will be taken to prisons/camps.

So McDonald's is helping empower the military-industrial complex police-state grid in more ways than one.

Boubear

How many kids under 14 do you know that can understand the words and thoughts associated with black listed websites? Again I've brought this up before, how does software scan pictures for black content without there being SEVERE drag on resources? Are they actually going in pay a group of web surfers to mark black sites?

What's to prevent black sites from going to a floating website service, where the pointers change day-to-day? I can just see Mc Employees snooping around the lobby playing policeman. Expect the cost of Big Macs to increase.

You would be surprise how much my 13 year old knows, him and a friend are educating their class mates about 9/11!! Makes a mother so proud!!

INTERNET speeds could slow by 30 per cent under the Government's proposed web filtering scheme, even though it will do little to block illegal content.

That's the warning from technical experts, who also say the plan could expose users' financial details during online banking sessions and see popular websites including Facebook and YouTube banned.

The warnings came after Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy confirmed the Federal Government planned to introduce a mandatory internet filter, shelving plans to allow Australians to opt out of the scheme.

Internet service providers, who would administer the filter, have been asked to conduct live trials of the filter before the end of the year.

But System Administrators Guild of Australia president Donna Ashelford said the plan was deeply flawed and would slow internet access down by about 30 per cent according to the Government's own laboratory trials.

Despite this, the national web filter would only censor web content, Ms Ashelford said, and could not deal with the remaining 60 per cent of internet traffic, much of which occurred over peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and LimeWire.

"The bulk of internet traffic is over peer-to-peer networks and the bulk of illegal content is trafficked is over peer-to-peer networks," she said. "There is no choke point at which they can block that material. I do not believe this is an issue that has a technical solution."

Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Colin Jacobs warned the web filter could also unwittingly make the internet unsafe for financial transactions by breaking the secure encryption used by banks online.

Five of the six web filters tested by the Australian Media and Communications Authority this year were able to filter websites using the secure protocol HTTPS, which would leave financial details exposed to the internet service provider in charge of operating the filter.

"If they sit in the middle and get between your web browser and the bank's server it really breaks open the security and leaves the details open to attack," he said.

"Once the chain of encryption is broken you can't say it is secure any more."

Mr Jacobs said the web filter plan would also face significant challenges trying to block illegal or inappropriate material on social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook where "one video or one dodgy Facebook profile" could see the entire website blocked from view.

The national filter would also fail to block material in online chat rooms, Mr Jacobs said, and could give parents "a false sense of security" when monitoring their child's online access.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.

The Australian government is set to impose Chinese-style Internet censorship by enforcing a universal national filter that will block websites deemed “controversial,” as part of a wider agenda to regulate the Internet according to free speech advocates.

A provision whereby Internet users could opt out of the filter by contacting their ISP has been stripped from the legislation, meaning the filter will be universal and mandatory.

The System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it will restrict web access, raise prices and slow internet traffic speeds.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia,” reports the Australian Herald Sun.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. (Complete black is white, up is down, double talk).

Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it.”

Speaking from personal experience, not only are “controversial” websites blocked in China, meaning any website that is critical of the state, but every website the user attempts to visit first has to pass through the “great firewall,” causing the browser to hang and delay while it is checked against a government blacklist.

This causes excruciating delays, and the user experience is akin to being on a bad dial-up connection in the mid 1990’s. Even in the center of Shanghai with a fixed ethernet connection, the user experience is barely tolerable.

Not only are websites in China blocked, but e mails too are scanned for “controversial” words and blocked from being sent if they contain phrases related to politics or obscenities.

Googling for information on certain topics is also heavily restricted. While in China I tried to google “Bush Taiwan,” which resulted in Google.com ceasing to be accessible and my Internet connection was immediately terminated thereafter.

The Australian government will no doubt insist that their filter is in our best interests and is only designed to block child pornography, snuff films and other horrors, yet the system is completely pointless because it will not affect file sharing networks, which is the medium through which the vast majority of such material is distributed.

If we allow Australia to become the first “free” nation to impose Internet censorship, the snowball effect will only accelerate - the U.S. and the UK are next.

In April 2007, Time magazine reported that researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time. The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

Moves to regulate the web have increased over the last two years.

- In a display of bi-partisanship, there have been calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens by both Democrats and Republicans alike.

- In December 2006, Republican Senator John McCain tabled a proposal to introduce legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards. It is well known that McCain has a distaste for his blogosphere critics, causing a definite conflict of interest where any proposal to restrict blogs on his part is concerned.

- During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News in November 2006, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”

- The White House’s own de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.

- The Pentagon has also announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.

- In an October 2006 speech, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” His solution is “intelligence fusion centers,” staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will are already in operation.

- The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress. Criminal charges including a possible jail term of up to one year could be the punishment for non-compliance.

- A landmark November 2006 legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations sought to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web - and their argument was supported by the U.S. government.

- A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.

- The European Union, led by former Stalinist John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

- The EU data retention bill, passed after much controversy and implemented in 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens’ data on phone calls, sms’, emails and instant messaging services.

- The EU also proposed legislation that would prevent users from uploading any form of video without a license.

- The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine. “At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.”

Governments are furious that their ceaseless lies are being exposed in real time on the World Wide Web and have resolved to stifle, regulate and control what truly is the last outpost of real free speech in the world. Internet censorship is perhaps the most pertinent issue that freedom advocates should rally to combat over the course of the next few years, lest we allow a cyber-gag to be placed over our mouths and say goodbye to our last medium of free and open communication.

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WeAreChange BrisbaneI hold personal views, beliefs and opinions that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of WeAreChange Brisbane as a whole.